The Tartan

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

I’ll be honest, this entire thing was inspired because someone asked me how my second year at Central Michigan was going and I snapped. And apparently an angry rant is juuuuust considered to pass as an opinion, so as long as I throw in a few “In my opinion”s and “I think”s, I should have my bases covered, right? So, here goes nothing.

In my opinion, Carnegie Mellon’s branding is so magnificently poor, I’m surprised we haven’t accidentally used someone else’s logos. 

And man, that’s just an awful situation to be in. See, it’s not a problem to us, the denizens of our own little circle of hell, because we’re all such nerds that if I mention Djikstra’s algorithm to a random passers-by, they’ll not only know what I’m talking about, but explain why I am a bit dim for bringing it up when it’s OBVIOUS that the situation calls for Bellman-Ford’s algorithm.

So, you know, these aren’t really the common crop of the great American experiment wandering around our hallowed campus.

And that’s not to say I don’t think Carnegie Mellon is a wonderful place. I mean, if I had to pick a location for my imprisonment, I could hardly do better than the dim and dreary halls of [any campus building]. Carnegie Mellon is great at giving its students a genuine, unforgettable, slightly-traumatic experience.

But my god, step about six feet outside of Pittsburgh, PA, and nobody knows who the hell we are.

Sure, that’s not a big deal, and yes, I could stand to do a little less bragging to my family in India. But dammit, bragging used to mean something in this country and I don’t intend to let obscurity stop me from going on and on about Dear Old Tech.

That did get me thinking though, what was it that made Carnegie Mellon so easily forgettable when, well, places like the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (population: six geese and about eight undergraduates who may or may not be geese at this time), or Gonzaga are much more known.

Well, it’s complicated. A lot of famous schools in the U.S. hold their fame from college sports. People know about Notre Dame because of Rudy and also “That One Time They Used To Be Good” (featuring people who are all dead now). People know about the Ivy league because of the mythos surrounding them, the way they inserted themselves into popular culture, but also because for a long time, they were sports draws that rivaled anyone else in the country. Ivy League sports are an institution in this country, and “my father played football for Princeton” was a common refrain amongst the rich white boys of the north.

However, that doesn’t explain a number of other places. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Caltech are both smaller institutions, Caltech an order of magnitude smaller, yet hold significant and outsized cultural impact. In MIT’s case, it pays being old, decently sized, and in one of the most historic states in the union. And also being across the street from Harvard. 

And that got me thinking about Caltech because while fans of spy novels and intrigue books might know about Caltech from its random mentions in a Grisham or Clancy novel, the school is insanely well known for a place that, well, doesn’t have anything going for it.

Caltech doesn’t have sports, it never did, and its undergraduate population is tiny. It punches far above its weight amongst graduates, but I’ll be honest, Tony and Pam from down Third Street don’t know about Caltech because of its contributions to particle physics. 

So why do they know about it? Well, I don’t wanna say “The Big Bang Theory.” But it’s “The Big Bang Theory.” See, Carnegie Mellon forgot about the best strategy to make your college a household name — make a long running beloved sitcom with characters that graduated from there! 

Which, by the way, Carnegie, if you want someone to come up with an idea for it, call me. I’ve already got at least four various TV shows already planned out, and I promise to only make one or two “Carnegie Mellon students are depressed” jokes an episode.

And while we can joke that Carnegie Mellon’s branding only really matters to people “in the know,” that’s not remotely the case. Look at things like the IRIS Rover Jacket. While it’s a really nice piece of gear, they had to include the ugly red block because nobody knows what the Scotty Dog is. We don’t have any easy way to tell people who we are — Stanford has the Tree “S” thing I can’t describe well, Caltech has loopy letters, MIT has a nice logo, and Carnegie Mellon has Times New Roman Font Left Justified Red Square.

There have been no efforts to market Carnegie Mellon. There have been minimal efforts to make Carnegie Mellon something people simply know about for reasons that are actually interesting to the common man, and not to nerds who do math in their free time. And without that, we’re doomed to keep correcting our relatives whenever they ask how that game against Northern Illinois went.